Monday, November 10, 2014

Adventures with Respiratory Infections

For the last week, Judith's been fighting off some sort of respiratory virus. She has a track record of getting sick around this time of year, so it's not exactly surprising that it happened. The wrench in the pattern, though, was the croupy cough that kept her up most of last Monday night, and lasted straight into Tuesday and parts of Wednesday before starting to resolve. As a result, her team put her on a 5 day course of oral steroids to help her out since upping the albuterol wasn't cutting it this time.

Getting her to take her antibiotics has been as fun as always. Her strong-willed temperament was awesome when she was in the NICU and needed to be so feisty, but now it's backfiring against us big time and leading to some interesting situations when it comes to oral medicines. No matter what I mask it in (save for 1 time when she took the entire dose in chocolate syrup, but wised up after that), she refuses it. It makes me wish that there was a human version of the pill pockets they make for dogs, because I'm that desperate to find a method to get the antibiotics into her without her noticing that I would keep the company in business. What it's really boiling down to is we're going to have to start teaching her how to swallow pills as soon as she can handle doing so, because I have a feeling that once she can't taste it, she won't fight it nearly as much.

I shouldn't be surprised by her reactions, though. For starters, it's kind of reaffirming the nagging little thought in the back of my mind that there may be some lingering preemie sensory issues that are causing these reactions. Judith can get really weird about certain textures, and even a really finely crushed pill is enough of a textural change to set her off. The other side of this coin is genetics, and I know it's coming from me. My parents frequently remind me about how hard it was to get any sort of liquid medication into me when I was Judith's age and even a little older, so I'd bet a cool $1,000,000 that a chunk of the issue is her taking after me. Once I learned to swallow pills, things improved exponentially (if I'm remembering things correctly ha ha). I can only stay optimistic and hope that Judith will be the same way.

We're about a week into the infection, and after a quick call to clinic just to make sure we don't need to add anything new or give her more steroids, it seems like she's on the mend and improving. We don't need to do additional steroids at this point, and we just need to keep doing the best we can with the bactrim to try and keep the MRSA at bay since that always flares when she's sick. Cross your fingers and toes that she continues to improve, and this is it for sickness for a while.